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by SV_BubbleTime 2002 days ago
That’s an interesting thought. With all the work to “run doom” there has been since the early 90s, I wonder how much of that effort would make Doom run better on that old hardware; I suspect not a lot.

It ram poorly on 386 machines, and wasn’t until the 486-66 that it was acceptable and the first Pentium (P6?) that I remember it being smooth.
2 comments
ohyes 2002 days ago
That would be interesting, I'd guess the floating point(and being twice as fast) were what really made a big difference.

It is also interesting to think that smart refrigerators and automobiles end up with significantly more capable processors and hardware than early desktops. 'Running Doom' turns into more a challenge of getting an operating system and a working C compiler onto the device than one of optimization.

I've often toyed with the thought of pushing the limits of the classic 2.5D FPS on modern hardware (without acceleration), pretty impractical being that most things have a GPU of some sort built-in at this point, but it would be interesting at least.

When GPUs became available it seems like everything kind of moved towards more 'true' 3D where everything became defined geometrically (QUAKE etc) rather than via sprites.

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tadfisher 2002 days ago
Doom used fixed-point arithmetic; you may be thinking of Quake, which essentially required the Pentium FPU to be playable.
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ohyes 2002 days ago
I'm definitely not knowledgeable enough in this area (old video game implementations), I was referring to the FPU on the 486 (386 didn't have one), it seemed to me that it might be a useful thing. Interesting it is all fixed point math in Doom.
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djsumdog 2002 days ago
The original Doom is super interesting in the design. You can't aim up or down because there is no up or down. You shoot at a guy at the top of a stair case and it will hit, because it's actually the same level. There's only one level. All the up/down perspectives are faked. In the original doom, you could never have a room above another room.
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trm42 2002 days ago
It ran smooth enough on 486/33DX with 10 Mb of ram. Actually it ran better on that than on 66 DX2 with 4 megs of ram.
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